By Ramsey Campbell “A


WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN fter-school hours and weekends hung


2011, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 111m 50s, $34.99, BD


off him in big drooping folds like an oversized car coat.” This is a line of dialogue from Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel. The first-person narra- tive includes sentences such as “I had explained my peripatetics more than once to foreigners as facilitated by my perception that ‘The United States doesn’t need me’.” In an interview, the author says .”..the concept of the unreliable narrator is not one that every reader is familiar with... I have painted a couple of incidents that deliberately cast doubt on her version of events, and that’s for the naïve reader. I am trying to circle that in red.” I did wonder if she meant to characterize nar- rator Eva Khatchadourian (a successful writer of travel books) as unreliable by having her misspell words, get film titles and film content wrong, write abominable prose and literally unspeakable dia- logue. I think not, since Shriver’s previous novel DOUBLE FAULT offers at least the last two faults, though it’s a third-person narrative. An appendix consists of issues for book groups to debate, and KEVIN is the perfect book for such gatherings, where people don’t evaluate the text but discuss topics it supposedly raises. It’s as though a film appreciation group were to watch PSYCHO and then spend their time arguing about care for the mentally ill. I’m glad Lynne Ramsay’s film of KEVIN is worth appreciating in itself.


At its core, and its greatest strength, is Tilda Swinton’s Eva, a nuanced and complex


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performance. Her failure to bond with her son Kevin, along with her guilt about it and how le- thal its results may have been, are central to both book and film, but the latter accords her more sympathy here and elsewhere. It’s also much clearer on the basic situation; the first shot of fif- teen-year-old Kevin (Ezra Miller) deftly establishes that he and his mother reflect each other. It’s one of many visual puns the film employs, often in the editing, which fragments the wilfully contrived structure of the novel. Thus Eva’s memories of pregnancy are twinned with her walk down a prison corridor away from Kevin into the light, a power- fully resonant juxtaposition. A dark visual wit is also at work, particularly in the widescreen composi- tions—indeed, whole scenes play as comedy, the dark uncomfortable kind epitomized by Mike Leigh’s work—and the use of color is as strikingly stylized as anything in Nicholas Ray. I don’t think I’ve seen red used with such eloquent selective- ness since his BIGGER THAN LIFE: see the red teddy bear in particular, or the mass of tins of Ramsay’s tomato soup against which Eva hides from a victim’s mother in the supermarket (one of several images with which the film improves on Eva’s unlikely phrase “Kevin Ketchup” in the novel). It’s to the credit of the film (and, to be fair, the


book) that it never presents Eva as an excuse or explanation for Kevin’s murderous spree. Instead, the film pins down how meaningless he feels— reducing family conversations to infantile gibberish


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